Ask Paul: March 27 (Premium)

Even with Spring in full motion, this weekend will be a lot less interesting than usual. Thanks, Coronavirus!

The new normal

will asks:

Not really sure how to ask this, but the world basically changed how it works almost overnight. Events have been canceled, people are working from home, and software development has slowed down. Our internal use of Teams has skyrocketed and people are changing how they work. In many ways it brings into focus what is important and what is just extra in our lives. I am curious how you see this impacting what has been “normal” for us for the past several years and decades?

I’m not going to find the words for this. I’ll try and stumble through this.

There are two parts to this topic: Work and personal.

On the work side, I think the Coronavirus pandemic has accelerated a shift that was already happening, at least for those of us who can theoretically work from anywhere. There was still pushback from traditionally-minded executives/bosses in traditional workplaces about people not being in the office, and I think that’s going to effectively end. There are real benefits—for the company, financially and from a productivity standpoint—to letting your workforce be as mobile/agile as possible. And there are real benefits for employees as well, of course.

But there has to be some balance. I’ve been working from home since about 1994 so I’m used to the basic schedule. But I like to travel and get out and see people at least sometimes. We need that connection. We can’t just suddenly all work remotely all of the time.

On the personal side, I hope there are more important changes that come about because of this thing. Less of a focus on things/stuff, especially. This is something I’ve struggled with and thought about for many years. Not because I’m particularly enlightened or whatever. I just have questions. I think about minimalism and downsizing. About change. Big change.

We collectively don’t understand what’s important usually, but this crisis has really brought that home, finally. I’m not glad it happened. But I hope the positive side-effects last.

And seriously, I don’t even care about myself per se. I’ve had a great life. I want my kids, our kids, to have great lives too. We’ve left them quite the world, haven’t we?

I know. There’s so much to say here.

Virtual whiteboard

Jchampeau

Sometimes I’ll meet with customers in their conference room or huddle space and use a white board to diagram out a problem and then a solution. I’m usually (but not always) drawing pieces of network equipment an the ways they connect. Like most others, I’m no longer traveling and meeting face-to-face, so I’d like to recreate the whiteboard experience over Zoom. I’m looking at the Wacom One tablet currently, because I can connect it to my desktop PC and use it as a second monitor which is perfect for Zoom meetings. I love my Surface Laptop but I don’t want to work from it full-time because I have an ultra-wide monitor sitting on my desk that’s much more comfortable to use. With all of your experience working from home, how have you seen this kind of thing done well and not done well?

Not exactly, but maybe this related story will help.

I was at a meeting on the Microsoft campus once and someone was drawing on a whiteboard. One of the Microsofties had an early Toshiba Tablet PC—it seemed like everyone at Microsoft was using that same model that year—and he remarked to me how incredible it was that he could recreate what was n the whiteboard by drawing it on my computer. My response was to pick up my digital camera and take a whiteboard. I had a perfect copy of the original and didn’t have to be an artist to make it happen.

I feel like, these days, there are so many good tools (Office Lens, etc.) for transferring a digital photo (or screenshot, or whatever) into a reusable/searchable format that duplicating the whiteboard maybe isn’t the issue. It’s just picking the right tool(s). I don’t have any particular experience with Zoom, but I would imagine just capturing screenshots of a whiteboard would do it, or at least be the first step in some workflow. I always capture screenshots whenever I have an online video briefing.

Microsoft does have a Whiteboard app as well, of course, if you’re looking to actually create content yourself live and share it with others.

Teams vs. the world

SeattleMike asks:

With the increase in use of Teams across the board, what do you see is the future of the competition with companies such as Slack or Zoom? Who wins?

No one wanted the Coronavirus to happen, but I feel like we’ll look back on this time as the moment Teams won, at least in business. The reason is that it’s just been sitting there, unused, for so many Office 365/Microsoft 365 users. And now that we see its benefits—live transcription, translation, and captioning, transcription search, and so—we’ll want that stuff after the crisis passes, even for those meetings where there were people in a room. This is a major breaking point with the past.

christianwilson also asks:

There have been a lot of articles floating online about how to socialize with friends and family while in isolation. I’m kind of baffled why Zoom is at the top of nearly all of these lists. Recently discovered privacy issues aside, you can’t even run a conference more than 45 minutes with Zoom without paying for it. I don’t see consumer Skype mentioned often despite offering a lot of advanced features for free.

I can understand Webex having more of an enterprise reputation, FaceTime being platform locked, but how did Microsoft lose the consumer audience with Skype? It wasn’t that long ago and Skype was practically synonymous with “video chat” in the collective mindshare.

I feel like Skype and Facetime are the big consumer solutions these days, both before and during the pandemic, and I do at least see it mentioned in articles about working from home. But yeah, Microsoft really blew it with Skype, and I suspect they will have to replace it with Teams across the board. It’s too bad: Skype is a great brand, and I’m not sure how the word “Teams” applies to individuals.

As an aside, this pandemic also nicely shows why choosing Apple’s lock-in solutions is bad. What’s the tagline for Facetime? “Chat with some of your friends during the apocalypse?” That sucks.